Editor’s note: This column first appeared in The Smoky Mountain News in June 2003.

Honey was a primary sweetening agent for the early settlers here in the Smokies region. And to this day there are numerous beekeepers in the region.

They trace the origins of their activity back to the introduction of the honeybee into North America. Prior to that time, sweetening was obtained primarily by tapping maple trees.

The honeybee probably arrived on this continent during the 1600s. They became so numerous that Native Americans called them the “white man’s fly.”

Donald Edward Davis notes in Where There Are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians (Univ. of Georgia Press, 2000) that “By the time of the American Revolution ... William Bartram found honeybees numerous ‘from Nova Scotia to East Florida.’ During his tour of the Cherokee country in 1796, Benjamin Hawkins reported that the Cherokees already ‘had bees and honey’ and were doing ‘a considerable trade in beeswax.’ Moreover, European plants such as apple trees were greatly dependent on the pollination of honeybees in order to consistently bear fruit. Certainly the honeybee also helped native plants, including Indian maize, to produce more prolifically.”

Sourwood honey is the most famous honey produced in this region. One just about can’t think about sourwood trees in bloom without thinking of the fresh sourwood honey that’s on the way. Fortunately, the blooming period of sourwood comes pretty much after that of its cousins, the mountain laurel and rhododendrons, whose honeys are toxic. Bees are said to prefer sourwood to any other tree. Stand under a sourwood in full bloom and you will hear the “song of summer” coming from the congregation of bees feeding high above.

The early white settlers made their bee gums from black gum (Nyssa sylvatica). This use was based on close observation of the natural world. Black gum is susceptible to a heartwood decay that sets in early at the top of the tree and works downward; therefore, hollow trees are common. The settlers simply sectioned a black gum, placed the sections on end with boards over the tops and bottoms, and made an entrance hole. Gums were also constructed from rough planks.

Obtaining a hive of bees was the next step. Bee-hunters sometimes located a watering place for bees and followed them back to their homes in hollow trees. Some hunters baited the bees with corn cobs soaked in honey and then followed them home. If their home base couldn’t be located at first, the hunter simply kept setting out more bait until he finally found it.

Volume 2 of the “Foxfire” series of books provides a unique “stink-bait” bee attraction recipe. One veteran bee-hunter recalled that it was virtually foolproof: “Old-timers used to put corn cobs and dirt in a bucket, urinate in it, and then leave it for a few days. When they got back, the bees would be there.”

The same bee-hunter recalled that “he would set up two bait locations, one a short distance from the other. When the lines from each were established, one had simply to follow each to the point where they intersected, and there would be the tree. When the tree was located, a deep ‘X’ or other sign was almost always cut into the bark. Such a mark was understood by the whole community as meaning that that particular tree was already someone’s property and thus could not be cut or interfered with.”

The bee tree could be felled at any time of the year, but the best time was in September when the bee-hunter could rob both honey and bees. He would bring an axe (to fell the tree), tub (for the honey), and bee gum or tow sack (for the bees). Once the tree was down, he would locate the queen bee and place her in front of the gum or tow sack. In short order, both she and her attendants would crawl into the gum or sack and be relocated at a site near the bee-hunter’s cabin.

Naturally enough, a great deal of lore has through the years become associated with bee-keeping. In Mountain Bred (Citizen-Times Publishing Co., 1967), John Parris has a chapter titled “When the Master Dies Move the Bees.” Therein he records a conversation he had with county farm agent Paul Gibson.

“‘There’s a lot of superstitions about bee-keeping,’ Paul said. ‘One is, if a colony of bees swarm you’ve got to get out and ring a bell or beat on a dishpan before they’ll settle. I don’t know why folks believe in it, for bees don’t have a hearing organ. They go by physical vibrations’

“‘Then there’s the one old-timers swear by. They say if the master dies the bees die with him, unless the bees are moved.’”

To check out this latter belief, Parris sought out Eliza Jane Bradley, then 87, who lived on Bunches Creek and was the recent widow of a master beekeeper.

“‘Yes, the bees are all right,’ she said. ‘We moved ‘em before we took the Old Man out of the house. I saw to that no sooner than I saw he was dead. You know, they always say that if you don’t move the bees when the master dies you’ll lose them. They’ll die, too. We just moved ‘em about an inch ... Just so they wasn’t like he had put ‘em. Ever’body’ll tell you it don’t matter how much you move ‘em, just so as you move ‘em.’

“‘Well, the Old Man died about 3:30 in the morning. Right away we sent to Bryson City for the undertaker. And the very next thing, I told one of my boys that the bees would have to be moved. He and another fellow went out — it was still dark and cold — and moved the bees. There was 23 stands. Since then I’ve lost but two ... Now, I know, as sure as I’m a-settin’ here, if them bees hadn’t of been moved there wouldn’t be a one out there now. I know what I’m talkin’ about.’”

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

This past week, we took our 11-year-old granddaughter, Daisy, who is visiting from Colorado, to the Cherokee Indian Village. She had been reading about the Cherokees and wanted to see “real Indians.” The tour was excellent. There were plenty of “real Indians.” We were lucky in that the Cherokees were holding a special dance ceremony to which the public was invited. Chief Michell Hicks was there and he danced, fairly well.

Daisy didn’t dance because she wanted to observe. She saw the bear dance, the quail dance, the friendship dance, and several others. The Cherokees in attendance were in a good mood. They especially enjoyed watching a teacher try to organize his kids — who looked to be 5 or 6 years old — into a disciplined covey of baby quails. They were about as organizable as a real covey of baby quails. But they were cute.

That evening, we talked some about Cherokee dance and other traditions. I told Daisy about Will West Long, one of my favorite Cherokees. The Cherokees of today are obviously keeping their traditions alive as much as possible. It was Will West Long who kept them alive 100 years ago.

He was born in the Big Cove area about 1870, the son of a Baptist minister, John Long, and Ayasta (Sally Terrapin). As was normal in traditional Cherokee society, the mother’s side of the family assumed responsibility for the rearing of children. The anthropologist James Mooney, who lived in Cherokee periodically from 1897-1890 collecting their lore, noted that Ayasta was “one of the principal conservatives among the women.” (I showed Daisy a photo of Ayasta in Mooney’s book.) Ayasta initiated Will into an understanding of tribal lore that subsequently withstood numerous brushes with acculturation.

After several lonely sojourns at Trinity College near High Point, Will returned to the Qualla Boundary and settled down to farming while learning more about the sacred formulas and other traditional lore from the conjurers and medicine men.

When Mooney arrived in the Big Cove in 1887, he felt an immediate attraction to Long — then a teenager working with the medicine man Swimmer — and hired him as a scribe and interpreter. Even after Mooney mastered the language himself, the two remained close friends.

Until several years before his death in 1921, Mooney periodically visited Will and other members of the Long family in the Big Cove. On one such occasion in 1913, he was invited to take place in a “going to water” ceremony commemorating the birth of a son. The entire family arose before sunrise, prayed, and then walked two miles to a special mountain stream. While Will West Long faced the rising sun, held forth colored beads, and invoked the Long Man (the designation for a stream in Cherokee mythology as it was a giant with its head in the mountains and its feet in the ocean), everyone else waded with the newborn child into the sacred water.

As a result of Mooney’s influence in the late 1880s, Will once again enrolled in an institution of higher learning. This time it was Hampton Institute. He subsequently spent 10 years in New England, learning and observing the dominant culture. The exposure didn’t take. Dissatisfied with that lifestyle, he returned in 1904 just prior to Ayasta’s death and seldom ventured away from the Big Cove again.

Having seen and experienced other possibilities, Will found that a white education had had little influence on the traditional spiritual lessons learned as a child from his mother. He began collecting notebooks from tribal conjurors that contained the ancient sacred chants and charms. He would on occasion appear suddenly at the Cherokee schools and captivate the children with tales and chants from their shared tribal past. Adept at all of the traditional Cherokee modes of expression — storytelling and dancing and singing — he was also the Eastern Band’s foremost authority on medicinal plants. Almost single-handedly, he kept the tradition of ceremonial mask carving alive.

He taught the old ways to the young people. Among these was his nephew Walker Calhoun. As a child Walker danced to the ceremonial singing of his uncle. The singing and dancing captured the boy’s imagination. Before he was 9, Walker could sing all of the old songs and dance all of the old dances.

I was pleased that Daisy, who has developed an interest in Cherokee ways, had a chance to see them dance some of the old dances kept alive by Swimmer, Ayasti, Will West Long, Walker Calhoun, the Raven Rock Dancers, and the school teacher last week who was doing his absolute best to organize that covey of Indian children for a quail dance.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

In the mid-1970s my primary writing interest was poetry. I was consumed night and day by poetry for perhaps five years and took part in poetry readings throughout the southern mountains. Some poems were published in little magazines like “Wind,” “Touchstone” and “The Small Farm” that flourished during that era. I even published a mimeographed newsletter-journal called “Unaka Range” that lasted a few years in which I had the audacity to publish at least one of my own poems each issue.

It was an era when every little town had at least one resident poet and quite often a small printing press of some sort. The readings were as much social as literary occasions, and the wine flowed before, during and after. I can recall some others, mostly poets, from this area who were a part of that scene: Nancy Simpson in Hayesville; Bettie Sellers in Young Harris, Ga.; Jim Stokely (Wilma Dykeman’s son) in Newport, Tenn., edited “Touchstone”; Jeff Daniel (Danny) Marion taught at Carson-Newman and edited the best of this region’s little magazines, “The Small Farm”; Thomas Rain Crowe was living in either Robbinsville or Cullowhee; Gary Carden was and is living in Sylva. Those associated with Western Carolina University included Newt Smith, Elizabeth Addison and Kay Stripling Byer, who was until recently the poet laureate of North Carolina. I can still hear Elizabeth Addison’s precise diction as she read her poems. I hated to read after Elizabeth because my own diction was so mumble-jumbled.

One of the young poets of that era from WNC was Robert Morgan, now primarily known for his novels and a recent biography of Daniel Boone. Robert didn’t show up at any of the readings because he was teaching far away at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. He was already writing the sort of close-observation poems about the natural world that I was trying to write. He did them so deftly I couldn’t figure out how to steal anything from him short of abject plagiarism. We corresponded some. He gave me one piece of advice that has stuck: “Be careful about adverbs.” The following is from Robert Morgan’s website:

“I was born October 3, 1944 in Hendersonville, North Carolina and grew up on the family farm [near Zirconia] in the Green River valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains... After starting out in engineering and applied mathematics at North Carolina State University, I transferred to UNC-Chapel Hill and graduated in 1965 with a B.A. in English. In 1968 I received a Master of Fine Arts degree from UNC-Greensboro... My first writing teacher was the novelist Guy Owen at N.C. State. He encouraged me to write stories and poems about the place and people where I had grown up. One day he brought one of my stories to class, an account of visiting a great-grandmother in an old house in the mountains, and announced he had wept when he read the story. This was better praise than I had gotten in math classes, and I was hooked on writing. My earliest publications were short stories, but I soon became caught up in the excitement about poetry in the late 1960s. I had a lot of encouragement from Jessie Rehder at UNC-Chapel Hill and Fred Chappell at UNC-Greensboro. Fred was the best reader of poetry I had ever met... [My] first book, Zirconia Poems, [was published] in 1969. After coming to Cornell in 1971, I wrote only poems for 10 years, and published three more books of poems, Land Diving, Trunk & Thicket, and Groundwork.”

I’m not sure why, but I got away from writing poetry about 1980 — or maybe poetry got tired of me. But of late, for reasons we won’t go into, I’ve gotten back to poetry. Poems are flowing out of me like water from a spigot in the back of the garden that someone forgot to turn off: haiku, sonnets, verses both free and rhymed, sestinas, Petrarchian renderings, you name it. Late last Saturday night I invented a poetic form new to the English language poetry I call “simulated blank verse,” whereby every 10 syllables you break the line and keep on trucking. Counting stresses or rhyming is frowned upon. If you can count to 10, you can write simulated blank verse.

I’m also back to where I started with Robert Morgan 35 years ago, studying his poems to see how he does it. I’ve decided that he has a gift for what he does. Could have been something in the water at Zirconia. Here are two excerpts and one complete poem, just in case you ever want to contemplate the circular interrelationships that exist between old hubcaps in a creek, an owl’s eyes, and discs that furrow the landscape.

Sprinkled with needles the snow is still intact in thickets.

Blind cars rusting in the woods.

Pink clay stains through the snow and yellow holes where rabbits pissed.

Cellars of air moving down the creek.

The valley sails on, a farm in its hold.

— from “Creek” (Zirconia Poems, 1969)

In the pine woods, at the log

enclosure with a roof

over one corner,

you can get up close

to the grunting breather.

And he knows you’re there, always

watching through a chink.

Suddenly whirls

his great weight

squealing to the other

side, for all his size quick as a cat; stands

in mud plush.

— from “Hogpen” (Land Diving, 1976)

Hubcaps

The tractor runs over dirt and shapes it, turning

stubble and moving the hill

furrow by furrow to the terraces, slicing clods, wearing

them away and chopping roots

to rot in sweet beds of decay.

The owl: eyes like arenas

gathering

the weeds and hungry ditches.

She guards the air like a monument

Shedding a field of energy downwind.

Old hubcaps burning all night in the creek.

— (Red Owl, 1972)

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

One doesn’t tire of certain places. Even though they inevitably change through the years, they become more than friends. The cove we live in has become that sort of place even though, in most ways, it’s just another mountain cove. There are no rare plants or birds. The views are comforting — if you enjoy gazing at nearly vertical mountainsides.

Most of the time it’s fairly secluded, except for the occasional hunter or fisherman or lost tourist. In years past, our cove was a trap of sorts for seriously lost vacationers from France. How they wound up on lower Lands Creek instead of downtown Gatlinburg was always a mystery. They couldn’t understand me and I couldn’t understand them. But with the help of a jug of red wine, we got along.

Most of the time, it’s fairly quiet — except for when Johnny Floor and his rock band kick it into gear up the creek at midnight with their high-octane cover of Townes Van Zandt’s “White Freightliner Blues.” In one swift generation, the cove has gone from Little Jimmy Dickens on the radio to Johnny Floor wired for high-tech sound. Well, let’s look at it this way: Johnny can sing better than Little Jimmy, and even at midnight, I’d rather hear “The White Freightliner Blues” than “Take an Old Cold Tater.”

Sometimes I’m asked, “How much would you want for your property?” To those eyes it’s just another plot of land — a commodity in need of improvement. Those eyes see it as something to be exchanged and re-exchanged on the marketplace. Bulldoze that old house and that rickety barn with the leaky roof and plywood sides. Get rid of that antiquated gravity-flow spring-fed water system. Flatten that ridge top and build a mansion with a sensational view someone lives in for six weeks a year and never calls home.

I can’t grasp that perspective. Never even tried. I do know that a homeplace isn’t a commodity. Even as things change, as they inevitably will, such places continue to lift our spirits and keep us going. Going on 35 years now and we continue to be renewed by the familiar shape of each ridge and the familiar patterns and sounds of the creek.

Back in the early 1990s, we had to move everyone into a large house in town for seven months because of my mother’s declining health. That’s when we found out just how much that spot “out in the country” had become a defining factor in our lives. Once we returned back into the cove after mother’s death, we felt more certain of our place and direction in life. There was quite clearly no place else we wanted or needed to be.

Everyone reading this knows what I’m talking about. Our emotional ties to specific places can be as ingrained as our ties to certain people. Our most deeply rooted feelings about certain people are often associated with specific places. That’s surely one of the reasons why the families of those moved out of the lands now occupied by the Great Smoky Mountains National Park are reluctant to cast core issues aside. Those issues are, after all, emblems signifying an ongoing attachment to certain places and not-yet-forgotten people.

But this is getting way too serious. It’s a simple matter. At the end of the day, each of us is lucky almost beyond belief if we have a place to go home to that means something — a place where you can punch up the “White Freightliner Blues” on the boom box, sit on the deck with a cup of red wine, and watch the creek flow by.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

One of the handouts I use during natural history workshops is headed “Southern Blue Ridge Province: Geographic Location and Influences.” It is the best “concise” approximation of the situation that I have been able to devise, as yet. I revise it from year to year, but many of the “facts” therein remain subjective. Here it is:

The Appalachians — created between 300 and 250 million years ago as a result of periods of mountain building brought about when the North American continental plate collided with the plates forming the European and African continents — extend some 2,000 miles from Canada’s Gaspe Peninsula to north Georgia and Alabama. They have been described as “The most elegant mountain range in the world.”

The Southern Appalachians can be defined as the ranges south of the point in northeastern Pennsylvania to which glacial ice sheets extended at the height of the Wisconsin epoch 18,000 years ago. That region consists of four geographic provinces: Piedmont, Blue Ridge, Ridge and Valley, and Plateau. The Blue Ridge is by far the most significant in regard to mountainous terrain.

The Blue Ridge Province of the Southern Appalachians extends from just south of Harrisburg Penn., to the hills of north Georgia just north of Atlanta, encompassing mountainous portions of southwestern Virginia, western North Carolina, east Tennessee, northwest South Carolina, and north Georgia. The Blue Ridge can be divided into northern and southern provinces, with the Southern Blue Ridge Province (SBRP) consisting of the terrain south of Mt. Rogers in southwestern Virginia to Mt. Oglethorpe in north Georgia.

The eastern front or escarpment of the SBRP is clearly defined from Virginia into South Carolina. On its western front the SBRP consists of the Unaka, Great Smoky, Unocoi, and other massive ranges. Connecting the eastern and western fronts are transverse ranges: Blacks, Great Craggies, Great Balsams, Nantahalas, and many others. The Appalachian system as a whole reaches its greatest elevation, largest mass, and most rugged topography in the SBRP where 125 peaks rise 5,000 feet or more, with 49 of them surpassing 6,000 feet. (From Mt. Rogers in Virginia northward to the Gaspe Penninsula only Mt. Washington in New Hampshire exceeds 6,000 feet.)

This topography profoundly influences the region’s average temperature (and thereby its plant and animal life, which exhibit strong northern affinities). The principle of verticality states that for each 1,000 feet gained in elevation the mean temperature decreases about 4 degrees F, equivalent to a change of 250 miles in latitude. (This means that if you travel from the lowest elevations in the SBRP at about 1,000 feet to the higher elevations above 6,000 feet, it’s the equivalent of traveling more than 1,200 miles northward in regard to the habitats you will encounter.)

The SBRP is situated where winds bringing saturated air masses from the Gulf of Mexico and the southern Coastal Plain are cooled and lose much of their content. (Air cools while rising to pass over a mountain range and can hold less moisture than warm air; therefore, heavy condensation occurs where large fronts first encounter massive ranges, as is the instance along the Blue Ridge divide.) The heaviest rainfall in the entire Appalachian region occurs along the GA-NC-SC borders, resulting in annual rainfalls of over 90 inches in many areas. (As much as 145 inches have been recorded with regularity since 1935 along the GA-NC line by the Coweeta Hydrologic Lab located near Otto). Taking this into consideration, some professional observers now refer to the area as a temperate rain forest. The higher elevations of the SBRP can be thought of as a peninsula of northern terrain extending into the southeastern U.S. where typical flora and fauna of northeastern and southeastern North America flourish. The region features approximately 1,500 vascular plants (many of which are considered to be showy wildflowers) and 125 species of trees (in all of Europe there are only about 75 species).

Not all agree on the exact extent of the SBRP. Not all agree on the number of 5,000- and 6,000-foot peaks. Not all agree on the definition for the “principle of verticality.” And so on. Almost nobody agrees on the location of the so-called “Temperate (or Appalachian) Rain Forest.” Here are three excerpts from various sources:

(1) “Temperate Rain Forests” of North America are usually defined by P.B. Alaback’s definition published in 1991 in the “Review of Chilean Natural History”: “Annual precipitation over 1400 mm [55 inches], cool summers stemming from an equable year-round climate with mean annual temperature between 4 and 12 degrees Celsius (39 and 54 degrees F.), and infrequent fire.”

(2) Temperate rain forests in the eastern USA are limited to areas in the southern Appalachian Mountains where orographic precipitation causes weather systems coming from the west and from the Gulf of Mexico to drop more precipitation than in surrounding areas. The largest of these forest blocks are located in western North Carolina, northern Georgia, and far eastern Tennessee, largely in the Pisgah, Nantahala, Chattahoochee National Forests and nearby Gorges State Park. In addition, small areas in the highest elevations of the Great Smoky Mountains also receive substantial rainfall, with Clingmans Dome, for example, collecting about 2000 mm of precipitation per year.

(3) An online description of Jocasse State Park by Stephanie Walker and Dirk Frankenberg reads, in part: ‘Near the southwestern corner of the state, the Blue Ridge escarpment rises over 2,500 feet from the Piedmont to the Highlands Plateau at 3,500 to 4,000 feet above sea level. This difference in elevation has been eroded by rainfall runoff into a half-moon-shaped indentation in the Blue Ridge through which five major rivers make their way towards the sea. These rivers have cut deep gorges into the escarpment, which are known collectively as the Jocassee Gorges after one of the principal streams. Annual rainfalls in the heavily forested Jocassee Gorges region can range upward of 100 inches - the generally accepted definition of a rain forest. In the temperate zone of the United States, this is the only rain forest east of the Olympic peninsula in the Pacific Northwest.’

The so-called “Appalachian Rain Forest” and many other aspects related to the Blue Ridge are starting to assume a mythical status in my mind.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

This past weekend marked the 26th annual Great Smokies Birding Expedition, a gathering of onrnithologically-inclined friends. On Saturdays, to get things started, we always walk around Bryson City, tallying the common species that prefer a semi-urban setting. The highlight of the morning was the observation of cliff swallows nesting for the second straight year on the sides of the I-beams that support Everett Street Bridge. Their mud-cup colonial-style nests are a work of art.

After lunch, we moved to the Blue Ridge Parkway and birded the different forest zones into the spruce-fir forest at the intersection of Balsam Mountain Road and the BRP. The initial highlight of that stop was hearing a Canada warbler singing, even though he remained hidden from view in the rhododendrons. But the Canada warbler’s place of honor was replaced when someone said, “Black-billed cuckoo.” Sure enough, from the nearby woodlands came the ku-ku-ku-ku-ku notes of the black-billed cuckoo. They sound to me like someone tapping a coffee cup rhythmically with a spoon.

There are certain sounds that haunt the southern highlands: wind sighing in boughs of spruce-fir; the ongoing, ever-changing murmurs of a mountain stream; the “singing” of a timber rattler’s segmented tail; and the forlorn calls of the cuckoos.

No bird species are more secretive. Seldom leaving the shrouding foliage, the cuckoo sits motionless. When it does move, the cuckoo creeps about with furtive restraint. Seeing one is possible but unlikely. For the most part, this is a bird that you hear. It is mostly a “voice” that arises somewhere in the near distance then fades away.

Many rural residents know the more common species as the “rain crow” since its guttural “ka-ka-kow-kow-kowlp-kowlp-kowlp” calls are often sounded just prior to a late evening thunderstorm. (The distinctive “kowlp-kowlp-kowlp” portion of the call sounds something like a small dog barking.) The cuckoos on our property often sound a single “kowlp” note rather than the full vocalization.

The second cuckoo species that nests here in the mountains, mostly in the upper elevations, is called the black-billed cuckoo because it lacks the yellow lower mandible of its cousin. I’ve never seen even one black-billed cuckoo, but I have heard its rythmic “cu-cu-cu cu-cu-cu cu-cu-cu” calls on more than a few occasions, most notably in the region of Blue Valley near Highlands, the Rainbow Springs section of the Nantahala River, and on the Balsam Mountain spur road of the BRP just beyond Mile High Overlook.

Both species winter in South America. They arrive in our region during the last week in April and usually depart by late October. If you see a yellow-billed cuckoo in flight, the most distinctive feature will be a double row of large white spots beneath the tail. The reddish flash of wing against the brownish body is also diagnostic. Henry David Thoreau described the bird this way:

“The cuckoo is a very neat, slender, and graceful bird. It belongs to the nobility of birds. It is elegant.”

The entry for the black-billed cuckoo in the Birds of North America Online (subscription) site contains these observations:

Graceful in flight but skulky and retiring in habit, the Black-billed Cuckoo is among North America’s most elusive birds. It is frequently confused with the more common Yellow-billed Cuckoo ... with which it shares similarities in plumage, behavior, and many vocalizations. Although both species occur ... through much of their ranges, the Black-billed Cuckoo has the more northerly distribution. In addition, Black-billeds prefer more densely wooded areas and can be found more frequently within coniferous vegetation. The Black-billed Cuckoo is rarely seen during migration and on wintering grounds in South America due to its silent and secretive manner. As a result, its nonbreeding distribution remains controversial. In North America, it is among the later migrants to return each spring; arrival on breeding grounds is announced by its staccato, repetitive call— cu-cu-cu cu-cu-cu —uttered as individuals fly overhead on late spring evenings. Vocal night flights increase as breeding commences. These flights, in concert with its quiet, sluggish behavior during the day, has led some ornithologists to suggest that the Black-billed Cuckoo is nocturnal in summer.

On Saturday, we heard the black-billed cuckoo calling for a while. Then the sound faded into silence. No one glimpsed the bird or even knew for sure where it had been. But the next time you’re in the high country and hear those steady rhythmic notes you’ll know what it is. With luck on your side, you might even see the bird. But don’t count on it.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

This past weekend marked the second annual Horace Kephart celebration in Bryson City. There was a terrific presentation of newly surfaced George Masa photographs moderated by Masa biographer Bill Hart. Daniel Gore brought his band from Washington State to play the Kephart tunes in the album “Ways That Are Dark.” Folk musician Lee Knight played and sang. Park superintendent Dale Ditmanson spoke at the graveside service in uniform but quickly reappeared downtown in a T-shirt and shorts. There was talk of moving Masa’s remains from Asheville to a place beside Kephart in Bryson City. I’ll oppose that notion. “Leave George Be” will be my anti-removal slogan. He’s been at rest in Asheville, where he lived and worked, for 75 years.

That’s about it ... except for the Kamp Kephart five-man contingent from the Schiele Museum of Natural History in Gastonia, N.C., which pitched their period demonstration camp near the railway depot.

Kamp Kephart is an educational workshop dedicated to late-19th and early-20th century campcraft and woodcraft and is named in honor of Horace Kephart, outdoorsman and author of Camping and Woodcraft, one of the cornerstones of American outdoor literature. Kamp Kephart leader Steve Watts asserts that the book is “no mere out-of-date period piece, but rather a viable guide with great relevancy for the 21st century.”

I spent a lot of time with the Kamp Kephart crowd at their “camp site” and later on in my office. A visit to this web site will give you an idea of what they’re up to in regard to presentations of period dress, equipment, etc: http://zombiehunters.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=43874

But they also think a lot about what they’re up to philosophically and spiritually. My last question of them was: “Which item of Kephart’s camping equipment would you like to find and have?”

“His tea cup,” one of them said. I knew exactly what he was talking about. You’ll find the “Kep’s teacup” on pages 111-112 of the first volume of Camping and Woodcraft:

“In his charming book, The Forest, Stewart Edward White has spoken of that amusing foible, common to us all, which compels even an experienced woodsman to lug along some pet trifle that he does not need, but which he would be miserable without. The more absurd this trinket is, the more he loves it. One of my camp-mates for five seasons carried in his “packer” a big chunk of rosin. When asked what it was for, he confessed:

“Oh, I’m going to get a fellow to make me a turkey-call, some day, and this is to make it ‘turk.’ “ Jew’s-harps, campstools, shaving-mugs, alarm-clocks, derringers that nobody could hit anything with, and other such trifles have been known to accompany very practical men who were otherwise in light marching order. If you have some such thing that you know you can’t sleep well without, stow it religiously in your kit. It is your “medicine,” your amulet against the spooks and bogies of the woods. It will dispel the koosy-oonek. (If you don’t know what that means, ask an Eskimo. He may tell you that it means sorcery, witchcraft — and so, no doubt, it does to the children of nature; but to us children of guile it is the spell of that imp who hides our pipes, steals our last match, and brings rain on the just when they want to go fishing.)

No two men have the same “medicine.” Mine is a porcelain teacup, minus the handle. It cost me much trouble to find one that would fit snugly inside the metal cup in which I brew my tea. Many’s the time it has all but slipped from my fingers and dropped upon a rock; many’s the gibe I have suffered for its dear sake. But I do love it. Hot indeed must be the sun, tangled the trail and weary the miles, before I forsake thee, O my frail, cool lipped, but ardent teacup!”

It would be nice to have that handless teacup in a museum ... but I also like the idea that’s it’s still out there ... maybe up in the old cabin at High Rocks . . . or tucked away behind a boulder in Bone Valley ... or somewhere back in Nicks Nest ... waiting for the right person, in the right frame of mind, to come along, pick it up, and say to himself or herself, “Kep’s teacup.”

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Numerous non-native plants have been introduced into the southern mountains during the last century or so. Many are now classified by wildlife biologists as “exotic pests.” Few would argue that kudzu does not fall into this category. And without doubt, the most notable alien mammal ever introduced into this immediate region was the European wild boar.

There are friends of the wild boar — mostly hunters — who believe that the animal’s outstanding qualities as a game animal outweigh its negative qualities. Then there are those who have observed its capacity to devastate large areas who think otherwise.

I used to be a friend of the wild boar. Its survival instincts and ability to adapt to truly rugged mountain terrain seemed to me to be admirable traits in any animal. In recent years, however, after some up close and personal encounters, I’ve changed my mind. More about that later.

A 29-page pamphlet by Perry Jones entitled “The European Wild Boar in North Carolina” (North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, 1959) tells the story of how the animal arrived and subsequently flourished in this region of the world. In 1908, the Whiting Manufacturing Co., an English concern, purchased Hooper Bald and adjoining lands near Robbinsville in Graham County. George Gordon Moore, an adviser to English investors, was allowed to establish a 1,600-acre game preserve on Hooper Bald in return for assisting the company with floating a loan of $2 million. Beginning in 1912, the preserve was stocked with 8 buffaloes, 14 elk, 6 Colorado mule deer, 34 bears (9 of which were Russian brown bears), 200 wild turkeys, 10,000 English ring-neck pheasant eggs, and 13 wild boar. For good measure, Moore also purchased 150 sheep and 150 turkeys locally.

“Almost immediately,” Jones writes, “blows of adversity began to strike the preserve. Some of the big bears promptly climbed out of the wire stockade, and since several of them had come from zoos, they would proceed to the clubhouse for food. The thought of a large bear appearing at any moment made sleeping extremely difficult. In order to return a bear to the lot, two men would have to lasso each of his front feet, pull him around a tree, and securely bind both pairs of feet together on the opposite side of the tree. Next, a pole was placed across the back of his neck, and his chin was pushed up firmly against the tree. While two men would hold this pole, another would put a collar securely around the bear’s neck. Two chains were then snapped on the collar. The pole and ropes were then removed, the bear was ‘collared,’ and the two men at the extreme end of the chain would hold the bear off each other. This procedure was described as ‘spread-eagling’ a bear.” So, there you go. Next time you need to deal with a bear you know exactly what to do — “spread-eagle” the varmint.

“The bear quickly fell prey to sharpshooting mountaineers,” Jones writes, and all the other animals rather quickly faded away in an environment they couldn’t cope with — all, that is but the wild boar. Area residents have long referred to the wild boar as the Russian (or “Roossian”) wild boar, but Jones speculates that they actually came from Germany. At any rate, they were the only ones to escape from the preserve and survive in the surrounding mountains.

“One source states that the wild boar were capable of sticking their legs between the rails of their pen and actually climbing over the fence,” Jones writes. “It seems likely, however, that the majority of them chose to remain within the enclosure where they were allowed to reproduce unmolested for a period of eight to ten years.” In the early 1920s, Moore’s foreman, Cotton McGuire, a Graham County resident who provided most of the information Jones collected, “invited some of his friends who owned packs of dogs up to the Bald for a grand hog hunt. This hunt was conducted within the boar lot, and by this time the boar had increased to an estimated herd of between 60 and 100. The Russian boar, however, turned out to be more than the hunters or dogs bargained for. Only two boar were killed, and at least a dozen dogs were killed, or severely maimed. Some of the hunters were forced to take refuge in trees to escape the charging beasts. Overly excited by the baying of dogs and shouts of hunters, the boar simply tore their way through the fence and escaped into the nearby mountains.”

Established in 1934, the 520,000-acre Great Smoky Mountains National Park has become their prime sanctuary despite extended shooting and trapping campaigns by the park service to eradicate them because of their destructive habits. A mature animal can attain a height of over three feet at the shoulder and a weight of over 400 pounds. The average weight, however, is probably less than half that. Ranging widely in herds, they are omnivorous, feeding on plant matter and small animals. The head of the wild boar is wedge shaped with a pointed snout, which enables it to root up the ground seeking underground tubers in search of food. According to Jones, “their menu also includes acorns ... grains, fruits, birds’ eggs, mice, carrion, and salamanders. During the spring and early summer, chick grouse and green corn ... are also included in the diet. The imported boars seem particularly to relish rattlesnakes, which they kill with their sharp-edged hooves ... Alone or in herds, a boar may travel up to 12 miles during one feeding period.”

Troy Hyde, a veteran Graham County hunter, told Jones that one could “root up concrete, if he put his mind to it.” That sounds like exaggeration until you see areas where they have been rooting. The first time I encountered such an area I momentarily wondered what fool had been rototilling in the national park. Then the hog smell betrayed the culprits’ identities. I was astonished at the extent of damage. But just how destructive they can be didn’t really hit home until several years ago when they came onto our property — which adjoins the national park in Swain County three miles northwest of Bryson City — and went to work digging up the richest wildflower area we have. (They especially love the tubers of the showy spring species: bloodroot, trillium, rue anemone, blue cohosh, trout lily, etc.) When we returned home after an extended absence, my first thought once again was that some fool had rototilled the slope behind the house. Then I smelled that smell and saw the hog tracks. At that time we had to temporarily discontinue using our gravity-flow water system because the critters decided to root and wallow in the watershed up on the ridge above the house.

North Carolina wildlife officers issued us an out-of-season hunting permit to help remedy the problem. But I didn’t have enough firepower to make a stand. The pellets from my 12-gauge shotgun would have only tickled a boar’s funny bone. (Wild boars have funny bones don’t they?) Anyway, I never fired a shot. After awhile, they upped and left on their own. Good riddance, we thought. Alas, they returned again last fall while Elizabeth and I were away for a week. This time they attacked a partly buried rock wall above the house. This 60-foot long wall had been built in the early part of the 20th century by a farmer clearing the hillside to plant corn. We suppose there was something living in or under the wall that the wild boar craved. We haven’t gotten around to clearing up the mess to this day. The hillside looks like several grenades had been detonated under the wall, throwing rock debris helter-skelter.

Wild boars are independent cusses that have made the transition from one continent to another with admirable ease. They didn’t asked to be hauled from Europe to Graham County, but they’ve made a go of it without any whining or bellyaching. That’s admirable. But you can’t really be the friend of an animal that pollutes your water supply and uproots rock walls on your property. Can you? Even kudzu doesn’t do that.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Our consideration of “books and all things related” continues with a look at an instance when a well-known author (and former librarian) chose to disguise his reading so as to create a literary persona.

Horace Kephart was often guarded, sometimes evasive, when giving reasons for choosing the Smokies region as a place of renewal. There was no doubt an element of chance in the decision. It’s probable, however, despite his denials of having done so, that he read travel accounts and studied government documents, many of which were available by the turn of the century.

For someone with Kephart’s areas of interest an easily located source would have been (and perhaps was) Wilbur G. Zeigler and Ben S. Grosscup’s The Heart of the Alleghanies or Western North Carolina: Comprising Its Topography, History, Resources, People, Narratives, Incidents, and Pictures of Travel, Adventures in Hunting and Fishing, and Legends of Its Wilderness (Raleigh, NC: Alfred Williams, and Cleveland, OH: W.W. Williams, 1883). Kevin E. O’Donnell and Helen Hollingsworth, authors of Seekers of Scenery: Travel Writing from Southern Appalachia (1840-1900), reproduce five magazine articles describing Western North Carolina, post-1875, including Frank O. Carpenter’s “The Great Smoky Mountains and Thunderhead Peak,” which appeared in the June 1890 issue of Appalachia magazine.

The “pub.doc” Kephart managed to unearth in “that dustiest room of a great library” — but absentmindedly fails to provide authors or title for — was Horace B. Ayers and William W. Ashe’s The Southern Appalachian Forests (Washington. DC: Department of Interior and U.S. Geological Survey, 1902), the monumental study that contains descriptions, maps and photos of the Smokies region as well as President Theodore Roosevelt’s detailed Letter of Transmittal, in which he observed: “These great mountains are old in the history of the continent which has grown up about them,” and having escaped “the ice on the north” display “that marvelous variety and richness of plant growth which have enabled our ablest business men and scientists to ask for its preservation by the Government for the advancement of science and pleasure of the people of our own and of future generations.”

Kephart had been for over a decade one of the most meticulous librarians in America. For the remainder of his life, he independently maintained the mindset and methodologies of the prototypical librarian. This trait is exemplified by the set of 27 journals — researched, categorized, alphabetized, indexed, and cross-referenced, more than once — he created so as to depict, often in great detail, almost every aspect of Appalachian culture, and more.

He wasn’t the sort who would venture into his own backyard without first taking a look at the relevant literature. By denying that he had access to written materials, the Smokies thereby became for his readers even more of a “terra incognita” — a land of “hidden possibilities” — in which, as his title for the first chapter of Our Southern Highlanders indicates, there is “Something Hidden; Go and Find It.” Via this calculated strategy, Kephart emerges as the somewhat heroic, albeit mild-mannered and curiously attentive, outsider who explores and describes the landscapes and lifestyles of a “mysterious realm.”

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

We’re still at it—considering books and related matters like shelving strategies, bookplates, home libraries, favorite books, and “How do we go about discovering the next book we’re going to read?” This could go on forever. This week, not having anything else in mind, I’ll reminisce some about the role books have played in my life. I’m not at all sure where this is headed, but I do know that it will be about some things that still mean a lot to me. We’ll start at the beginning.

I was born in Danville, Virginia, where, after my father was killed in World War II, I was raised as an only child. Mother, who never remarried, purchased a small house on North Main Street in an ideal location; that is, adjacent to our backyard was a ball field, where pickup football, baseball and other games were ongoing year-round; and beyond the ball field there were woods and a small creek that flowed several miles into a river. When I wasn’t playing ball or walking in the woods or fishing in the creek, I was reading. Reading has always been one of my greatest pleasures. At one point in my life it was, for lack of a better word, magical. We’ll get back to that.

I grew up wanting to be either: (1) a pitcher for a major league baseball team (preferably the Brooklyn Dodgers), or (2) a writer. It became apparent almost immediately, even to me, that the pitching thing wasn’t going to work out; so, I focused on my backup plan. Because of my infatuation with the reading experience, I did eventually become a writer, of sorts. And somewhat to my surprise, I also became a naturalist, of sorts—a strategy that has allowed me to spend a lot of time in the woods.

My mother’s name was Ruth. She read something to me every night. I recall that she was a good reader, not overly emphatic, and seemed to enjoy the stories—no doubt, in part, as a diversion from more pressing concerns of which I was unaware. I will always remember that she read to me every night.

Once I was reading on my own, she subscribed to a children’s book club that mailed a new book every other week addressed to me. It was addressed to me and it was my book. That’s important. I had a bookcase beside my bed in which I arranged my accumulating collection however I wanted.

By the time I was maybe nine years old, I was using the city library. It was housed, as I recall, in an ornate two-story cube of a building located, just like everything else, on the other side of town. It was reputed to have been the seat of the “Last Capitol of the Confederacy.” I never knew if that was true or not and never really cared. I was interested in the books.

On Saturdays when a game of some sort wasn’t scheduled, I’d catch a city bus first thing in the morning over to the library and spend the day reading down in the basement, where the juvenile books were shelved. There was a sign that warned young people not to enter the main library. The gray-haired librarian in charge of the basement did look like a Confederate spinster or like my idea of what one ought to look like. Her hair was pulled back in a tight ball on the back of her head and held in place with a long pin. I can’t recall her name but we got along. On the sly, she let me check out as many books as I could carry home on the bus.

There was a green cloth-covered chair in my bedroom that I always sat in when reading. If I situated myself, just so, in that chair—with a book opened on my left side and the fingertips of my right hand quietly turning the pages, something would happen. For hours it sometimes seemed, a rare emotion would envelope me, and I would be transported into the world about which I was reading.

When I had read pretty much everything down in the basement worth reading, the Confederate spinster obtained a special dispensation from the head librarian that allowed me to come upstairs and read—so long as I didn’t venture into a certain room, where I supposed the dirty books were shelved. In the far corner of the main reading room there was a plush chair in which I always sat, just so, while reading. It was also magical, especially when there was a steady rain falling on the roof of The Last Capitol of the Confederacy.

At Chapel Hill I majored in English because I still loved reading more than anything else, a whole lot more than, say, chemistry, math, economics, German, and other unlikely opportunities. Back then—this was in the early 60s—the Bull’s Head Book Store was located in the basement of Wilson Library. If a book was worth reading, they had it; and you didn’t have to buy it—there were chairs in which you could sit and read anything for free. Anything. Even the dirty books by writers with names like Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac and D.H. Lawrence. And once again there was a chair involved. It was a soft black leather or imitation-leather chair tucked in behind a partition. While sitting in it, just so, I could still enter the dream world of each book as I read it . . . they were books with beautiful names . . . The Old Man and the Boy . . . Specimen Days . . . Go Down, Moses . . . My Antonia . . . Far Away and Long Ago . . . The Odyssey . . . Ulysses . . . Urn Burial . . .Lie Down in Darkness . . . Give Your Heart to the Hawks . . . Tender is the Night . . . names that stick with you for a lifetime, long after you have forgotten the plot and most of the characters.

But that was the end of the magic. I grew older, assumed responsibilities as best as I knew how, and lost the capacity to be fully transported by what I was reading. A person I talked with about this experience suggested that things changed for me with “a loss of innocence.” Maybe so . . . a more realistic explanation would be that my way of processing information changed. The stories and images that books relate — fiction and non-fiction, alike — had once flowed into my system unimpeded with galvanizing impact.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at,.